Sometime around this time of year marks the fourth anniversary of my blog and I’m once again in Vermont writing from my beloved porch overlooking the bay.  There is a southerly breeze, some puffy white clouds scudding over the mountains and wavelets lapping on the shore make a wonderful white noise for pondering.

For having written for so long, you’d think I’d have hit the one thousand post mark.  But no.  I might have, if I hadn’t hit this slump earlier this year.  Ah well … some day soon.

LightBoy is sitting next to me, working on his latest project: a programming language out of MIT called “scratch.”  He’s doing quite well with it and has made some cool little computer games.  He’s decided that when we get home he wants to learn some linux.  Alrighty, then.  Sounds like a school project to me.

LightGirl is off running (literally) with her friends and will go swimming their return.  She is drinking up their constant presence like water in the desert.   Her transition to the boys hockey team this fall is likely to be somewhat rocky and she will not have the company of the girls she is accustomed to each week.

LightHusband is next door helping a neighbor with a computer problem.  He’s been fishing, fishing and more fishing.  He has done some catching this year but has been too lazy to do the cleaning necessary for eating.  Last evening he saw an osprey catch a fish that was almost too big for the bird to fly with.  The return of more osprey to the lake is a good sign.

I am reading novels again for the first time in years.  Returning to some of my old favorite authors and old favorite themes.  John Steinbeck has been a favorite author since I was a teenager and I’ve read nearly all of his books, some two or three times (or more).   But I found one I’d never read (To A God Unknown) and gulped that down in one afternoon/evening.  Then, because I loved the original (Pillars of the Earth), I picked up Ken Follett’s World Without End.  This one took a little longer to read, but I’d forgotten how satisfying it is to drown in a novel.  And I do.  The characters become friends, the words swim by creating scenarios rather than sentences and paragraphs.  I can’t explain what happens, but it’s not really reading so much as it is living within the book.  And I am always bereft when a book ends.  What will happen to the characters next?  I tried next to pick up Night by Elie Wiesl, but couldn’t make the jump from 12th century England to the 20th century concentration camps.  I’ll read it soon, but have to transition.

So … I’ve been doing this with sometimes more and sometimes less enthusiasm for four years now.  Is my term up?  I don’t think so.  I know I have more to write and feel it burbling up more and more frequently now.  But the writing I want to do is deeper, more complex and takes more of me.  So I think it will happen less often but be of greater quality … perhaps.  I hope it will be more thought-provoking or thought-enhancing or maybe just thought-ful.  So there will be more to come here in my tiny few mega-bytes of the tubes.  I hope you’ll enjoy it.